When a project is big enough to have two or more teams working on the same project, we recommend that each team have its own backlog of User Stories and each team size its own stories with Story Points. Of course, this inevitably raises the idea of having each team conform to some “story point standard” so that project progress and team progress can be tracked "uniformly." Doing this more or less means that teams have to normalize story points across all the teams so that, for example, a 5-point story for one team is the same as a 5-point story for every other team on the project; an 8-point story is the same for every team, etc., etc., etc.

All I have to say to this idea is: “Ugggghhh… What a collosal waste of time!" I’ve seen teams try to do this and the effort put into trying to ensure uniformity of sizings across multiple teams is enormous.

I’m happy to report that there’s an easier way that still allows for overall project progress to be easily seen as well as individual team progress. In essence, instead of normalizing based on story points we suggest “normalizing” based on the calendar. Let me explain: let’s assume, for example, there are two teams on a project, each having its own backlog that has been sized with story points. Team A has 2000 story points on its backlog and Team B has 500. In this case you would have three burndown charts to track progress: one that’s combined (showing 2500 total points), a second one for just Team A (showing 2000 total points), and a third one for just Team B (showing just 500 points). In order to determine relative progress for Team A and Team B, you base it on the number of points completed vs. the number of iterations... Thus, if you're half-way through the project (e.g., 5 of 10 planned iterations are complete), you would expect Team A to be ~1000 points complete (50% of its total) and Team B to be ~250 points complete (50% of its total).

Where things get to be a little more complicated is when you have numerous teams working on a project (for some enterprise application projects we’ve worked with, we’ve seen over 40 teams working on the same project). With two teams, it’s fairly easy to bounce back and forth between Team A’s release burndown chart and Team B’s release burndown chart. When you have more than that, you can create a very simple chart (using any spreadsheet tool) that shows “percent calendar complete” and “percent story points complete” for each team. Following are two examples that we’ve used (they show the same data, just in different formats):

Figure 1

Figure 2

You’ll notice in the first chart that the schedule is 60% complete (the black bars) and then each team’s relative progress is shown. In the second chart, a stacked bar is used to show overall team progress. In this made-up example, Team 1 is slightly ahead, Team 5 is slightly behind, and the other teams are perhaps struggling...

I’m sure you can think of other, different ways of showing the data, so do whatever’s most helpful. The key is that this approach is so much easier and simpler than trying to normalize the sizing of story points across multiple teams.

Velocity is a great tool for agile teams but it is easy to "over-engineer" the concept -- or even misuse it. Velocity is a mechanism to understand the pace of a team that uses story points to size their user stories.

First, a quick comment regarding story points – Leslie and I advocate the usage of “unit-less” sizings of user stories, meaning that story points are not associated with any measure of time. Story points are simply an assignment of size relative to other user stories that a team works on. Thus, a 3-point story should take approximately 3 times the amount of effort for the team as a 1-point story -- irrespective of how long it takes to complete either one. Note that story point sizings are just relative sizings and they work no matter how long it takes to actually complete a given story of a given size.

Back to velocity… Velocity, simply put, is the term used to describe a team’s observed capacity for completing work. Velocity is calculated by taking the average number of story points a team completes each iteration. For example, if a team completes 8 story points’ worth of user stories in its first iteration, 12 in the second, and 10 in its third, then the team’s velocity is 10 (the average of 8, 12, and 10). Note that several iterations had to be completed first in order for the team to determine its velocity (we advocate a minimum of three iterations before starting to use velocity for project planning and tracking).

Even though the concept is simple, I’ve seen teams misuse velocity and, as a consequence, reduce its value. I’ll address three of the most common misuses in the following paragraphs:

First, velocity is incorrectly used as a "report-card" each iteration. Assume the example I used above where the team has a velocity of 10. Let’s say that their next iteration they complete 6 story points. In organizations where velocity is not understood, the team will likely be called on the carpet and asked to explain what happened (the thought being that their productivity dropped by 40%!). Given that the assignment of story points is an estimation technique and not something to be measured to 26 digits of precision, there should be an understanding that the number of points a team completes each iteration will vary from iteration to iteration. Perhaps in this iteration the team is working on a story that they underestimated. Big deal… Chances are in a subsequent iteration they’ll work on a story that was overestimated. Over the course of several iterations, the team's velocity will average out. Please do not use the number of story points a team completes in any given iteration as a report-card. Use the average and save everyone a lot of headaches from micromanagement.

Secondly, and closely related to the first, is teams erroneously claiming "partial credit" for a story. When teams are seeing the number of story points completed in a given iteration used as report-card, they tend to start trying to claim partial-credit for an incomplete story. In this scenario a team might say, “We got the code done, so that’s worth 2-points out of this 5-point story.” Even though the testing, defect fixing, automation, etc., hasn’t yet been completed, they're just trying to boost the total number of points claimed in the iteration. Unfortunately, this approach defeats a number of benefits of adopting agile. First, it breaks down team synergy by reverting back to an us-vs.-them mentality. When the whole team gets “credit” for completing a user story when it’s actually complete, then the team is motivated to help each other out. If partial credit is allowed, then this can pit parts of the team against other parts. The second problem with this approach is that it violates the agile principle of working software as the measure of progress. Code that has been written, but is untested, is not “working software.” Code that has been written and tested, but where defects haven’t been fixed, is not “working software.” Working software should be the focus for the team… And let me close this section with another simple example: let’s say a team is targeting completion of two 5-point stories this iteration (their velocity has been ~10 points an iteration, so targeting 10 points’ worth of stories makes good sense). Let’s say they complete the first story and are almost complete with the second. If the team tries to take partial credit, they might claim 4 of the 5 points for the second story and, thus, their story point totals for this iteration would be 9. Next iteration, they’d plan to finish off the last bit of the second story and then, most likely target and additional 10 points' worth of new stories (since they have been averaging 10 story points so far and they almost completed 10 points last iteration). Let’s say they complete all that work in the next iteration for a total of 11 points. What’s their velocity for the two iterations? It’s 10. Now let’s take the “no partial credit” approach. The team would get 5 story points for its first iteration and 15 for its second. What’s the velocity for the two iterations calculated this way? Right, it’s also 10. This is why focusing on velocity as an average is so liberating for teams – they’re not constantly under the microscope and don’t feel compelled to play games with partial credit.

The last abuse of story points and velocity that I’ve seen is that teams get their velocity "dictated" to them. They’re told to achieve some level of velocity before even knowing what their velocity is. Remember, as mentioned at the opening, velocity reflects the team’s observed capacity to complete work each iteration. Typically, when teams are dictated a velocity, its in “fixed content/fixed date” projects (which are anathema in agile). Teams wind up working tremendous amounts of overtime to meet their dictated velocity (which is also anathema to agile).

Finally, there are legitimate ways to go about increasing velocity, as well as illegitimate ways. The most prevalent illegitimate way is forcing a team to do overtime – this is not sustainable and will only cause problems down the road. The legitimate ways to increase velocity is to pursue what I call “enabling” practices: increasing test automation, improving builds by adopting continuous integration, adopting test-driven development and pair-programming, automating provisioning of test environments, automating deployments, and many others. Yes, putting effort into maturing these practices may mean you slow down the amount of functionality you produce in the short run, but the long-term benefits (such as sustained velocity improvements) will be well worth the initial investment. Velocity is simple - keep it simple. Increasing velocity is where the hard work is.